Social Media in the Arab World by Barrie Gunter Mokhtar Elareshi Khalid Al-Jaber

Author:Barrie Gunter, Mokhtar Elareshi, Khalid Al-Jaber [Barrie Gunter, Mokhtar Elareshi, Khalid Al-Jaber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Middle East, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9780857728661
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

Discussion

While the current study provides a fair indication of how young Emiratis take advantage of social media, mainly through their dependency on mobile phone technology, it is not generalisable. It emerged that the majority of respondents use social media for entertainment purposes. For example, they use the internet to watch music programmes and videos. Indeed, neither younger nor older Emiratis were questioned in this survey. Because they are young, many are not yet employed. Furthermore, the in-depth interviews with communication professionals do not paint a very broad picture of what is happening in the country.

The current study recommends the undertaking of a comprehensive survey of a representative sample of the country’s population, including non-Emiratis, who after all make up nearly 90 per cent of the population – and who generally do not have the same discretionary income as Emiratis. The United Arab Emirates, a nation of approximately 13 million people located in western Asia on the Gulf of Arabia, has a remarkably high use of digital platform technology for a nation that is only 42 years old. Citizens and expatriate workers are both strongly connected to the world by their mobile phones and other web-based technologies, including laptops and tablets. In this context, the UEA has one of the world’s highest penetrations of smartphone use, standing at 62 per cent in 2013 and projected to reach 71 per cent or 3.75 million by 2016, according to a survey by Google.

The study also acknowledges that follow-up surveys of other major groups in the UAE may not yield nearly as high a response rate. Clearly, young people in the Emirates are highly wired, often own multiple mobile phones, and are very active on social media and the internet in general. Many Emiratis own multiple smartphones and are consistent users of BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Keek, and other forms of social communication exchange. The UAE has one of the world’s largest participation rates in social media, with more than 3.5 million Facebook users, 69 per cent male and 31 per cent female, as of mid-2013. Among young people, Instagram and WhatsApp are the preferred social media. In view of the hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter, government leaders have taken an aggressive approach to the use of social media, holding regular social media symposia for government agencies and launching campaigns to make government more interactive and responsive to UAE residents. At the same time, hundreds of UAE citizens and residents have launched charitable and volunteer campaigns using social media with tangible results, which we will document.

The third and fourth questions in the survey35 should have had follow-up questions to give the subjects the opportunity to tell us more about how they obtained news. The survey allowed multiple answers, and to these questions such answers were given. For example, in Question No. 3, the study should have asked a follow-up question about how the respondents document their lives and, since ‘Other’ had a 33 per cent response rate, another follow-up question might have asked them to describe those other experiences with social media.

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